Tommy: A Persevering Life in the Fiery Trials of Mental Illness

[Reading Time: 6 min]

‘Go to Tommy’s house.”

“What,” I thought. “I’ve never been there; He’s forty years older than me; And I don’t really even know him that well.”

“Am I just supposed to just show up at his house?”

The sense was “Yes.”

I was on my way back to college but I stopped only to find him in a state “of total darkness.” “It’s never been this bad before…”

I had known Tommy long before entering medicine. He was a bit crazy, for lack of better words, with what seemed like a near continual low-level baseline mania. Whenever we would speak to him it was hard to ever get a word in. Mind racing. Speech pressured. I would come to find out, though, much, much more about who he was beyond merely the manifestations of his psychological disease burden.

He was born into a family who was known in that small Southern town as being “cursed.” His father was an abusive alcoholic that had essentially abandoned him. His mother, forced to raise him, had little to do with him during and after his childhood. Going further back, his grandfather, also an an abusive alcoholic had left the family a generation earlier. All that was left was his grandmother, who essentially raised him. Though a real believer, she suffered from deep, deep depression, which would intensify to the point that she would actually load a shotgun and give it to him as a 5-6-7 year old saying, “You’ve got to shoot me, Tommy.” “You’ve got to make it end.”

He finished high school and though a very intelligent person he never got a formal college degree such that he worked various manual labor jobs up and down the Eastern Seabord. His first marriage ended in disaster. In a total manic state in his late 20’s, he became progressively paranoid and ended up shooting his wife in the back. Deemed a “crime of passion”, he ultimately got off after a long stint in the psychiatric ward.

In his 30’s, however, he ended up becoming involved in a local church that had just hired a pastor that had just completed his PhD studies in Scotland. Under the thrice-weekly exposition of the Word fueled by the weekly prayer meeting, he became absolutely enthralled. Getting to know this small Southern town pastor (and himself coming into a good bit of money from his next marriage), he literally bought every book quoted from the pulpit, eventually accumulating a theological library that was truly second to none. Probably 10,000 volumes at one point (before he sold it all in a manic state when he was under financial pressure), he could easily navigate back and forth between the wide-ranging books in our conversations with almost photographic memory.

When his second wife died, their family cut him off from all of her wealth such that he was reduced to near abject poverty. In and out of work due to his battle with mania and depression, the situation would have drastically worsened, had it not been for a local doctor in that community, who functionally took him in and supported him. (This same physician is one of the main reasons I ended up getting into medical school…but that’s another story.)

At any rate. up and down for decades, in and out of the mental health facilities, on and off psychotropics, he was married once more. And this time it was not to a person from great wealth, but with true humility. They lived together in a tiny little apartment in section 8 housing (the same one I went to that night). After a number of years, however, she came to develop Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, a.k.a. Lou Gehrig's disease), an incurable, progressive, neurologic disease that leaves a person totally paralyzed with an active mind but an inability to even speak. With his own complicated history and ongoing struggles, he, nevertheless, took care of her faithfully until she died.

This is when I reconnected with him my fourth year of university. And I would speak with him weekly for hours at a time over the next decade until he died.

Why do we mention all of this? For two reasons:

1) His mental battles were inextricably bound up with his family past, “the sins of the father” we might say. As you well know, that is in no way unique. There is a genetic component to mental illness (Bipolar, in particular) which is passed down in and reinforced by family pathologies.

Here is the point, however—in the absolute darkness that surrounded and enclosed him during in his cyclical depressive periods, he would many times distance himself from the medical and psychiatric establishments. We knew he was “at risk”; we knew he would inevitably come off his medication; we knew that he would become further and further isolated, such that he would be left to battle the disease on his own.

Yet it was precisely in these moments (as a decade of close friendship with him can testify) that relationship could, in a certain way of speaking, do what medicine could not. It had the unique ability to reintegrate him back into new degrees of health. That is to say, even with all the advances in medicine and psychiatry, it availed him little when the disease was it its worst. Isolated, alone, struggling, suffering, he would simply cut himself off. And even if he did not do this (which did happen), and as a faithful patient, went to his weekly/biweekly, etc. psychiatric and counseling appointments, taking his medication with perfect compliance, he still suffered.

And Medicine, I came to find out, cannot finally take away suffering nor was meant to. But it offers us the unique ability to enter into the suffering of another and, in so doing, practice medicine in community with empathy by love through the Gospel of Jesus. And the effect of this can somehow help contribute to a person’s deeper capacities to endure and even flourish in the midst of hardship. (More on this in the section on “Key Research: Past and Present.”).

2) We write this because of the tremendous example of this man, who never become “well-known.” In fact, when he was “known” in his life, the judgement was that he was, as I said at the beginning, just “crazy.” He had “little” to offer us. He was just a messed up guy from a messed up family who messed his own life up as the years went by. Yet the pastor who came to that little town that I mentioned earlier would say of him decades later that he had a “heroic faith.”

Yes. That is absolutely right—a heroic faith.

What if I, what if you, went through what he did? What if darkness so enclosed you like it did him? What if we experienced literally 1/100th of what he experienced, how would we respond?

How would we cope? What would we really do with all that we know?

That is a real question that only our life in this world will reveal to us.

And so I leave you with his example and this question.

When I was at his graveside funeral a few years ago, I was asked to read a selection of Scripture. In those moments before this little gathering of people, I found myself overwhelmed with emotion, stumbling over nearly every word, hardly able to articulate anything. And it wasn’t just mere “sadness” for his “loss.” It was much, much more than that.

This may not be theologically accurate, but the only way I could process it later was that I felt, in a certain sense, the way that Jesus felt at the grave of Lazarus when He wept. It was not simply sadness and grief for the loss of Lazarus; it was inarticulable grief (στεναγμοῖ), for the misery of the condition of fallen man in this passing Fallen Age.

I got through the readings then sat down.

And now I am left to ponder Tommy’s life, his suffering, his example. And it is that with which I now leave you.